Suggests that reading instruction, guided by a knowledgeable and sensitive teacher, is one means of complementing and facilitating oral language learning for the language-impaired child. Argues that the complex relationship between reading and oral language must be explored in depth. (RS)

A study investigated the effect of foreign accent and speaking rate on native English speaker comprehension. Three native Chinese speakers and one native speaker of American English read passages at different speaking rates. Comprehension scores showed that an increase in speaking rate and heavily accented English decreased listener comprehension.…

Study of how the verbal component of "babytalk" affected three-month-olds' (N=40) vocal qualities suggested that conversational turn-taking facilitated a speak-listen pattern of infant vocalizations and indicated that what adults "say" to infants influences what infants "say" in response. (Author/CB)

Examined variations in pitch dynamism in five male and five female speakers of French and English, finding that the pitch dynamism of the males and females was not significantly different in any of the conditions tested. (69 references) (MDM)

This article compares children's productions of wh-questions such as "who?" or "what?". Data were gathered using the technique of elicited production. (26 references) (JL)

Analysis of the effect of an authentic, unedited French radio program on student listening skills found that listening comprehension improved with increased exposure to authentic speech, suggesting that adjusting levels of speech speed, content, and form according to students' developing comprehension might not be essential to improving listening…

Two studies of the unintelligible speech of developmentally delayed children found that more intelligible child speech was found in routine than in nonroutine situations and that extracted utterances were more intelligible under context-information-present conditions. (35 references) (Author/CB)

S. Glucksberg and B. Keysar's (1990) class-inclusion view of metaphor understanding does not properly acknowledge metaphor's role in everyday cognition. Metaphor is a powerful scheme in long-term memory by which people make sense of their experiences. Evidence supports tacit conceptual metaphor's role in comprehension of verbal metaphors in…

Argues that Plato considers his philosophical doctrines unwritable and shows how this assumption can be mobilized as the dominant trope for interpreting Plato. Suggests that Platonic texts deploy language in dramatically rhetorical fashion to control the reader and lead her analogically to a vision of an extralinguistic reality. (RS)

Discusses such errors in transcribing real time in spoken discourse as inconsistent use of transcriptional conventions; use of transcriptional symbols with multiple meanings; measurement problems; some cross-purposes of real-time transcription; neglect of time between onset and offset of speech and silence transcription; and transcriptions that…

Addresses the relevance of storytelling as an informal technique that gets children hooked to reading and writing. Maintains that the technique is highly regarded as providing children with a wide range of conceptual experiences that prepare them for the literacy challenge. (SR)

Two large collections of spontaneous transcribed speech (over 2000 conversations), one U.S. and one British, were analyzed for word repetitions. Four stages of repeated words reflect different principles, and the principles appear to be general and not specific to repeats. (SLD)

Identifies the major issues that need to be confronted in resolving the controversy over the historical roots of African American Vernacular English. and discusses their implications for reconstruction. (Author/VWL)

Suggests that various parts of the grammar of American Sign Language--particularly its verb and pronoun system--give convincing evidence that such grammar cannot have derived from the grammars of spoken languages; rather the continuity is from cognitive activity expressed in gSigns toward linguistic organization both of the expressive material and…

Discusses the impact of the development of a dictionary of Jersey Norman French. The dictionary has created a perception among speakers of Jersey French that they did not know the language. This perception appears to be the result of the ecological change that the dictionary produced by repositioning the language from an oral habitat to a written…